Axios

The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled Monday its planned actions to regulate pervasive industrial "forever chemicals" that are used in hundreds of consumer goods and have been linked to adverse health effects.

Why it matters: The long-ignored and largely unregulated chemicals, which can last for hundreds of years without breaking down, are facing new scrutiny under President Biden, who previously promised to designate them as hazardous.

A Mississippi utility is installing what's being billed as "the world's first large flexible transformer" — an Energy Department-backed project aimed at boosting grid resilience and smoothing integration of renewables.

Driving the news: GE Research and Prolec GE, working with the Mississippi power company Cooperative Energy, this morning are announcing the launch of a six-month field demonstration at a big substation in Columbia, Mississippi.

Here are two big questions as a key Democratic proposal to slash emissions from power generation flounders: how much its demise would sap climate protections, and what might replace it.

Catch up fast: New financial carrots and sticks for utilities to deploy zero-carbon power — the Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP) — look unlikely to stay in Democrats' big social spending and climate bill.

Pique Action, a new media company launching today, is betting that short form "micro-documentaries" that tell stories about people working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will help to counteract our doom-scrolling tendencies.

Why it matters: The media organization, launched by film veteran Kip Pastor (whose credits include "In Organic We Trust," and "Sickhouse," the first film shot and distributed on SnapChat) and social media strategist Tyler Steinhardt, plans to distribute positive stories about climate solutions through social media platforms like SnapChat, Youtube, TikTok and Twitter.

Oil and gas production is a key part of the Texas economy. But the state is poised to perform well even if tackling global warming sends the sector into decline, a Dallas Fed analysis argues.

The big picture: Energy price swings have long affected Texas' financial fortunes, with sharp declines "depressing broader activity."

Joby Aviation, which is working to certify its electric vertical take-off and landing air taxi (eVTOL), is simultaneously thinking within and outside the box.

Why it matters: First, the plane looks like the result of a merger between a helicopter and dragonfly. Second, and here is where the traditional part comes in, Joby is designing its plane and planning its flight operations for today's air traffic system, rather than waiting for the FAA to certify new "vertiports" where eVTOL aircraft can land and take off vertically.

• Pilots for Joby would have the same types of flight certificates they do now, provided under what are known as Part 135 rules, opening the company up to a larger talent pool.

Between the lines: This approach gives Joby a leg up on the competition, as does its takeover of Uber Elevate, which will allow it to show up on the Uber app as an aerial trip option for users, while also operating its own air taxi app.

• It wasn't until late last week, when I tried out the Joby flight simulator in Washington, that I realized what sets this company apart: Its aircraft design.

Details: As a pilot of small planes since I was 14 (I soloed on my 16th birthday), I jumped at the chance to fly Joby's full-scale flight simulator, which the company set up for journalists and policymakers in D.C.

• Like many pilots of fixed-wing aircraft, I'm intimidated (actually, terrified) by the idea of piloting a helicopter. This is because the instincts needed to master one will quickly get you into trouble in the other.
• A plane in the air naturally wants to keep flying straight and nearly level. A helicopter, not so much.
• Thus I was delighted by the fact that Joby's plane may look like a helicopter hybrid, but it handles like an elegant, intuitive, fixed-wing aircraft — with some noteworthy exceptions.

How it works: In the simulator, I took off from Washington Reagan International Airport and climbed to about 500 feet. I then took my hands off the controls as instructed (an Airbus-like joystick in one hand, and a "speed" control — not a throttle — in the other), and was astonished that the plane just sat there, maintaining altitude, airspeed and its angle of attack.

• I practiced forward flight, and a transition to a helicopter-like landing at the Pentagon heliport, under the guidance of Greg Bowles, Joby's head of government affairs.
• The plane's redundancy is comforting, with multiple small, simple electric motors across the aircraft, making a single point of failure less impactful. Another safety feature is the flight software's prevention of any pilot inputs that would put the plane outside the envelope of safe flight, similar to how modern commercial aircraft work.
• Joby's planes seat four, plus the pilot, whereas competitors like Beta Technologies will seat slightly more with six passengers, and fly farther, at about 250 nautical miles.

Between the lines: Joby's aircraft has already proved to have a range of 150 miles, and NASA sound testing has shown it has a far smaller noise footprint when compared to today's fleet of executive helicopters and small planes.

• In other words, when air taxis fly between locations in urban areas, it's unlikely to provoke noise complaints.
• Joby is working toward an airworthiness certification in 2023, with operations starting in 2024, that would allow it to operate its electric air taxi within the air traffic environment that exists today, Bowles said.
• Joby views itself as an aircraft builder and airline, and will be operating air taxi operations with conventional Cirrus aircraft first, before integrating the eVTOL planes into its fleet, Bowles said.

Yes, but: It remains to be seen whether consumers will pay for electric air taxis in droves in order to drive costs down, or find them safe, and what markets will be best suited for them.

• In its slide deck for analysts this past summer, Joby pitched Southern California as an ideal market. The company believes there's at least a $500 million market in the L.A. area alone.

Investigators seeking the cause of the massive California oil spill said Sunday that the pipeline at the center of the leak may have been dragged along the ocean floor by a 1,200-foot cargo ship months before, AP reports.

Driving the news: The Panama-registered MSC DANIT may have struck the pipeline with its anchor when it arrived at the Port of Long Beach during a severe storm in January, breaking the pipe's inch-thick concrete casing and dragging it more than 100 feet, per AP.